Carrie Chapman Catt: and the League of Women Voters!
Presented by Pat Jordan
In 2020, Americans will celebrate the Centennial of American women achieving one of the primary rights of citizenship in our democracy—the right to vote.
It took 72 years from the first Women’s Rights gathering in Seneca Falls, NY to the day the 19th Amendment was adopted on August 26, 1920, and the Woman Suffrage effort was one of the most intense and difficult campaigns in our history. Women and men worked day and night to convince our legislators that every citizen--regardless of gender--deserved the right to vote, and one of the most important individuals in finally making it a reality was Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist leader, secret ‘Winning Plan’ strategist, and founder of the League of Women Voters.
Carrie was the women's rights dynamo who succeeded Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was featured on the cover of Time, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, received the American Hebrew Medal, and in 2016 had a statue dedicated to her and other suffragists in Nashville, TN, the state where the final vote was cast for the 19th Amendment. Carrie Chapman Catt’s life and the story of woman suffrage is an amazing and dramatic odyssey that is important, engaging and relevant today.
Pat Jordan if the American Historical Theatre brings her story to you, beginning with the Iowa farm girl who stood up for justice to the 40-year veteran of Woman Suffrage who became one of the most well-known women in our country in the first half of the 20th Century. Whether you are a Baby Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Y or Gen Z, this woman and the millions like her gave you a voice in our democracy!
Today, Carrie Chapman Catt’s crowning achievement remains with us in the League of Women Voters, which she founded to help women gain political knowledge and get information needed to be informed voters, free of religious or racial bias, and achieved through non-partisan political education and leadership.